Big Cases, Small Pay, and a Lawyer Happy With Both

THERE are many kinds of lawyers. Some defend the vilified, like mobsters and disgraced congressmen. In return, the lawyers can win money and fame.

But others defend the forgotten — tenants, busboys, people at the wrong end of a police truncheon — and are themselves forgotten.

Ray Brescia is one of those lawyers.

"I have a vicious streak when it comes to injustice and correcting injustice," said Mr. Brescia, the son of a salesman and a schoolteacher in Huntington, on Long Island.

Mr. Brescia, 39, is director of the community development project at the Urban Justice Center in Manhattan, a nonprofit legal clinic founded in 1984. He supervises 10 lawyers and social workers who provide legal and other assistance to grassroots organizations, like tenant and immigrant groups. He is also associate director of the center, which has 60 employees.

Since high school, Mr. Brescia's working life has involved either the poor or the mentally ill or public-interest law. His wife, Amy Barasch, is the executive director of the Brooklyn Family Justice Center, part of the Mayor's Office to Combat Domestic Violence. No word yet on the career path of their son, Leo, who is 2½.

Far from wealthy, Mr. Brescia has worked odd jobs to get by: as a golf caddy, a busboy and a dishwasher at a Long Island country club, a butler for a socialite, and a highway paver.

"The most important thing I learned about working with 400-degree asphalt is, never wear boots," he said. "Good comfortable shoes like Converse All-Stars let the heat escape."

He can't recall ever wanting to work for a big corporate law firm. "The money would be nice," he said, "but money isn't everything." He added, "I knew what I wanted to do a long time ago, and I've stayed on that path."

Last month, lawyers from the Urban Justice Center's community development project sued Jing Fong, the largest restaurant in Chinatown, alleging that it had violated labor laws violations by, among other things, siphoning off tips from waiters and busboys.

"As a former busboy and waiter, I care about this stuff," he said.

Mr. Brescia's experiences as a butler inform his work, too. While wearing a white jacket, black pants and a tuxedo tie, he learned a lot about his future job raising funds for the Urban Justice Center. His socialite boss raised money for her favorite charities at small dinner parties.

"She never asked for money," he said, "but at the end of the evening, you left $10,000 poorer."

While an undergraduate at Fordham University, Mr. Brescia handed out food to the homeless on the D subway line, all the way to the Norwood station in the Bronx.

Photo

I knew what I wanted to do a long time ago,
and Ive stayed on that path. RAY BRESCIACredit
James Estrin/The New York Times

"It was a window on domestic poverty that I wasn't really exposed to when I was growing up," he recalled. "Disordered mental states, infected cuts, maggots, just horrible, horrible stuff. And my reaction was, do something about it."

He sought out Yale Law School because students could apply for trial work in their first year. "I was in a hurry to become a lawyer," he said.

Mr. Brescia's big case came before he graduated and became the subject of a recent book, "Storming the Court: How a Band of Law Students Sued the President — and Won," by Brandt Goldstein, a classmate.

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Mr. Brescia was a leading member of a group of law students organized by a professor, Harold Hongju Koh, who is now the dean of Yale Law School. In 1992, when President Bush's father was in the White House, Haitian refugees otherwise eligible for asylum in the United States were detained in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in large part because they were H.I.V.-positive. They had no lawyers.

Then, as now, the federal government argued that foreign prisoners at Guantánamo did not enjoy the same legal rights as in the United States. The students, aided by a large New York law firm, argued on behalf of the prisoners.

In a precedent-setting but limited decision by a federal judge, a former marine who once served at Guantánamo, the Haitians were freed and allowed to enter the United States.

MR. BRESCIA'S passion for immigrant rights continues. In February, lawyers from his community development project negotiated a $300,000 settlement for Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian immigrant who used to run a restaurant near Times Square. He was mistakenly detained for nearly a year on suspicion of terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.

Mr. Elmaghraby, who was held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, charges that while he was shackled, he was kicked and punched until he bled. The settlement was the first arising from the government's sweep of Muslims and others after 9/11.

"It was an important precedent," he said, "and $300,000 is a lot of money for a guy in Egypt who wants to get on with his life."

Civil litigation and out-of-court negotiation, which make up much of public-interest law, can take years.

Only recently did Yvonne Pascal, a Haitian refugee at the center of the 1992 prisoner-rights suit, receive her green card. She is now a health-care worker in the United States; her son joined the Marines and has recently returned from Iraq. Mr. Brescia has been her lawyer for 14 years.

Perhaps sensing this reporter's interest in a good story, Mr. Brescia says that Yvonne Pascal is a pseudonym and that she does not want to be identified under any circumstances.

"She wants very much," Mr. Brescia said, "to lead a quiet life."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Cases, Small Pay, and a Lawyer Happy With Both. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe